ITT continued to supply Germany with advanced communication systems after Pearl Harbor, to the detriment of the Americans themselves, whose diplomatic code was broken by the Nazis with the help of such equipment. Until the very end of the war, ITT’s production facilities in Germany as well as in neutral countries such as Sweden, Switzerland, and Spain provided the German armed forces with state-of-the-art martial toys. Charles Higham offers specifics:

‘After Pearl Harbor the German army, navy, and air force contracted with ITT for the manufacture of switchboards, telephones, alarm gongs, buoys, air raid warning devices, radar equipment, and thirty thousand fuses per month for artillery shells … This was to increase to fifty thousand per month by 1944. In addition, ITT supplied ingredients for the rocket bombs that fell on London, selenium cells for dry rectifiers, high-frequency radio equipment, and fortification and field communication sets. Without this supply of crucial materials it would have been impossible for the German air force to kill American and British troops, for the German army to fight the Allies, for England to have been bombed, or for Allied ships to have been attacked at sea.’

No surprise then that the German subsidiaries of American enterprises were regarded as ‘pioneers of technological development’ by the planners in Germany’s Reich Economics Ministry and other Nazi authorities involved in the war effort.’

Edwin Black also claims that IBM’S advanced punch card technology, precursor to the computer, enabled the Nazis to automate persecution. IBM allegedly put the fantastical numbers in the Holocaust, because it supplied the Hitler regime with the Hollerith calculating machines and other tools that were used to generate lists of Jews and other victims, who were then targeted for deportation and to register inmates [of concentration camps] and track slave labor. However, critics of Black’s study maintain that the Nazis could and would have achieved their deadly efficiency without the benefit of IBM’s technology. In any event, the case of IBM provides yet another example of how US corporations supplied state-of-the-art technology to the Nazis and obviously did not care too much for what evil purposes this technology would be used.

Profits uber Alles!

The owners and managers of the parent firms in the US cared little what products rolled off the assembly lines of their German subsidiaries. What counted for them and for the shareholders were only the profits. German Branch plants of American corporations achieved considerable earnings during the war, and this money was not pocketed by the Nazis. For the Ford-Werke precise figures are available. The profits of Dearborn’s German subsidiary rose from 1.2 million RM in 1939 to 1.7 million RM in 1940, 1.8 million RM in 1941, 2.0 million RM in 1942, and 2.1 million RM in 1943. (Research Findings, 136). The Ford subsidiaries in occupied France, Holland, and Belgium, where the American corporate giant also made an industrial contribution to the Nazi war effort, were likewise extraordinarily successful. Ford-France, for example — not a flourishing firm before the war — became very profitable after 1940 thanks to its unconditional collaboration with the Germans; in 1941 it registered earnings of 58 million fra ncs, an achievement for which it was warmly congratulated by Edsel Ford. (Billstein et al., 106; and Research Findings, 735) As for Opel, that firm’s profits skyrocketed to the point where the Nazi Ministry of Economics banned their publication to avoid bad blood on the part of the German population, which was increasingly being asked to tighten its collective belt. (Billstein et al., 73)

IBM not only experienced soaring profits in its German branch plant but, like Ford, also saw its profits in occupied France jump primarily because of business generated through eager collaboration with the German occupation authorities. It was soon necessary to build new factories. Above all, however, IBM prospered in Germany and in the occupied countries because it sold the Nazis the technological tools required for identifying, deporting, ghettoizing, enslaving, and ultimately exterminating millions of European Jews, in other words, for organizing the Holocaust. (Black, 212,253, and 297-9)

It is far from clear what happened to the profits made in Germany during the war by American subsidiaries, but some tantalizing tidbits of information have nevertheless emerged. In the 1930s American corporations had developed various strategies to circumvent the Nazis’ embargo on profit repatriation. IBM’s head office in New York, for example, regularly billed Dehomag for royalties due to the parent firm, for repayment of contrived loans, and for other fees and expenses; this practice and other byzantine inter-company transactions minimized profits in Germany and thus simultaneously functioned as an effective tax-avoidance scheme. In addition, there were other ways of handling the embargo on profit repatriation, such as reinvestment within Germany, but after 1939 this option was no longer permitted, at least not in theory. In practice, the American subsidiaries did manage to quite considerably increase their assets that way. Opel, for example, took over a foundry in Leipzig in 1942. It also remained possible to use earnings in order to improve and modernize the branch plant’s own infrastructure. That too happened in the case of Opel. There also existed opportunities for expansion in the occupied countries of Europe. Ford’s subsidiary in France used its profits in 1941 to build a tank factory in Oran, Algeria; this plant allegedly provided Rommel’s Africa Corps with the hardware needed to advance all the way to El Alamein in Egypt. In 1943 the Ford-Werke also established a foundry not far from Cologne, just across the Belgian border near Liege, to produce spare parts. (Research Findings, 133)

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